Following a major platform overhaul in 2025, Folks now offers a native payroll module built specifically for the Canadian market. It’s a specialized tool for SMBs that need an all-in-one ecosystem for HR and recruiting without the overhead of enterprise-grade software.

In our testing, the integration felt seamless. Employee profiles serve as a single source of truth, pulling in payroll data, vacation tracking, training records, and performance reviews. It’s intuitive and eliminates the friction of jumping between apps.

Where Folks really differentiates itself from global/US-centric competitors like BambooHR and Rippling is its deep focus on local compliance. It handles everything from CRA remittances and ROEs to multi-province tax filing. A standout feature is the workplace incident manager: when we logged an accident, the system automatically populated the WSIB Form 7, a major time-saver for lean HR teams.

The payroll experience also benefits from Folks’ broader HR automation features, such as vacation requests, absences, onboarding workflows, employee records, and e-signature documents, all of which feed into the same ecosystem. We particularly liked the “set it and forget it” approach to onboarding and document workflows, which felt intuitive during testing and should reduce administrative overhead for lean HR teams.

You also get a choice in how much control you want, with self-service, assisted, or managed models. The full bilingual support is a necessity, not an afterthought, making it a top pick for companies operating across Quebec and the rest of Canada.

The trade-off is its hyper-local focus. If you have international employees or need complex, enterprise-level data analytics, you’ll find Folks too limited. It’s a specialized tool for a specific audience, and it knows its boundaries.